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The wildfires rampaging through southern California hogged headlines. All three anchors jetted off to San Diego to survey the damage. ABC and CBS both slapped a logo on the story--California Burning and Firestorm in California respectively--and both Charles Gibson and Katie Couric kicked off their coverage with a helicopter tour over the flames. On a logofree NBC, anchor Brian Williams started from the ground in a scorched suburban cul de sac. This was only the third time all year that all three newscasts have originated from the scene of a breaking story: the others were the Virginia Tech campus shooting in April (54 min) and the Minneapolis I-35 bridge collapse in August (45 min). These fires (47 min) accounted for a massive 79% of the three-network newshole.

A dozen or more fires burned out of control in seven counties. "These fires are not isolated in forests somewhere. They are right…in highly populated areas," ABC's Gibson explained. He pointed down from his helicopter: "Those are not low lying clouds sitting over a valley area. That is simply smoke." In San Diego County alone, CBS' Couric calculated, 346,000 homes had been ordered evacuated. NBC's Williams (at the head of the Don Teague videostream) relayed the Associated Press estimate of displaced persons at 950,000: "Much larger than Katrina, it would make it the largest single peacetime movement of Americans since the Civil War." Already 1,000 homes have been incinerated in San Diego, Gibson recounted, and some 200 in the resort community of Lake Arrowhead, in the mountains east of Los Angeles. Couric was told that the total of lost homes would be 2,000 before the fires were doused. Yet the evacuations have succeeded. So far the fires have killed only two people: "That is an amazingly low death toll," marveled Gibson.

Andrew Tyndall 10/24/07 9:47:30 pm

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